alt Hacker NewsI am not sure that it's a function of English language per se. I speak several language and it's the same story with all of them and one of those languages is Slavic so it comes from a very different root. That said, Greece is a rock throw away and I think the ancient Greek mathematicians(Pythagoras primarily) might have something to do with it: The Egyptians were the first known to use symbols to represents parts of something but it wasn't until the Greeks introduced fractions to express a quantifiable representation of sub-divisions of a unit, making the sub-division it's own unit: you need 4 * 1/4-th's of something to make it to 1 complete unit.
Then again, I could be wrong.
In Italy we would translate "two 2s, zero 3s, and one 5" as "due 2, zero 3 e un 5". No plurals for the numbers. By the way "un" is the "a" article and not the "uno" number. Using the number would sound more than strange.
Languages are just what they settled down to be, until they change little by little every day.